Ronald Radosh criticizes the CNN series on the cold war, 1999

New York Times
January 9, 1999

Finding a Moral Difference Between the U.S. And the Soviets

By RONALD RADOSH

Ted Turner and the producers Jeremy Isaacs and Pat Mitchell
have managed to produce an often riveting
and generally comprehensive account of the Cold War that
will probably become the source most used
to acquaint young generations with its history.

Anyone who doubts that there was a fundamental struggle between
the forces of democracy based in the
West with its thriving civil society and those of the
totalitarian camp led by Stalin and his successors will find
stark and powerful evidence of what it meant to try to lead a
normal life in the so-called socialist camp.

Watching clips of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the
suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968,
one can't help being moved by the courage and commitment of the
first generation of Soviet bloc dissidents.
As one of them says, the Soviets had to suppress them; they were
afraid of their "becoming an organized
political force." It was, another says, a system that "produced
only evil."

The final episode gives the last word to President Vaclav Havel
of the Czech Republic, who says that
Communism simply was an affront to the normal desires of human
beings just moments after we see
Fidel
Castro reaffirming his commitment to the Communist ideology.
The
moral difference is starkly presented for
those who doubt that the long conflict was simply an unnecessary
fight between two imperial superpowers
vying for hegemony.

It is more unforgivable then that this message has been
undermined by some abhorrent episodes, which
suggest a moral equivalence between the Soviet Union and its
satellites and the democratic Western allies. To
me, the single worst episode was "Reds" (the sixth of the 24
programs, which appeared on Nov. 1), because
it compares the epoch of Stalinism and the gulag to that of
McCarthyism in the United States.

In both countries, the narrator, Kenneth Branagh, states: "The
Cold War was fought by fear. . . . Both sides
turned their fear inwards against their own people. They hunted
the enemy within." The millions killed by Stalin
are somehow to be equated with the few who were blacklisted or
lost teaching jobs.

The ideological bias in these episodes is usually implied by
selectively using facts and combining them in a
one-sided way. Although the most recent evidence has proved that
Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy for decades,
for instance, he is presented as a noble figure hounded by an
evil Richard Nixon.

"Hiss," we are told, "firmly denied that he had betrayed his
country. Richard Nixon, an ambitious young
Republican, was convinced that Hiss was lying. Hiss was jailed
for perjury. Nixon's name was made." The
documentary does not say that Hiss was guilty, suggesting that
Nixon unfairly did him in.

As for Julius Rosenberg, who the latest evidence shows was a
Soviet agent who put together a network of
spies, viewers are left with the impression -- after hearing the
grisly details of the execution -- that just as
Stalin killed his dissenters, America killed its own.

"The spirit of McCarthyism, the smearing of dissent as Communist
treason," Branagh says, "stained American
democracy for decades. In the Soviet Union, all dissent was
suppressed." But Hiss and Rosenberg were not
arrested and found guilty for dissent. They were Soviet agents.

There is also an overly sympathetic slant when it comes to
Central America and the Caribbean. Unlike the last
episode, these episodes present the United States as the
oppressor, while Fidel Castro is presented as a hero
and given a disproportionate amount of air time. He is never
challenged in any of his arguments.

The series says that Castro turned to the Soviets only after the
Coubre, a Cuban munitions ship, blew up in
1960 and declared himself a socialist only after the Bay of Pigs
invasion. New evidence showing that Castro
already had made military agreements with the Soviets before the
Bay of Pigs in 1961 and had privately made
clear his Marxist allegiance is simply ignored.

The series also suggests that Daniel Ortega Saavedra and the
Sandinista revolutionaries freed Nicaragua in
1979 from an American-backed dictator and that when their power
collapsed, it was because of fierce
American opposition. In "Backyard" (the 18th program, to be
broadcast Feb. 21), we hear that in 1990
"Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega asks the Nicaraguan people to
vote him President. . . . Violeta Chamorro,
Ortega's opponent, narrowly won a surprise victory. Washington
spent nearly $10 million backing her
campaign."

The implication is that were it not for the overwhelming
political and monetary intervention of the United
States, the revolution would have stayed in power. But those who
were there to monitor the election, as this
writer was, saw that the Sandinistas had a virtual monopoly on
government-provided campaign funds and
resources, including American-produced music videos, and that it
regularly interfered with opposition freedom
during the campaign. The opposition, the historian Robert Kagan
notes, "spent a little more than half of what
the Sandinistas spent."

Despite this, Chamorro obtained a 55 percent majority, while
Ortega received only 41 percent of the vote.

The filmmakers chose to focus on the voices of ordinary people
who lived in the Cold War era. But whose
voices did they choose?

There are scores of people who criticized Communism but
vigorously supported the civil liberties of its
supporters, but we don't hear from them. Had such a witness
appeared, the presentation might indeed have
provided some real balance.

Throughout, leftists are presented as heroes unfairly
persecuted. We see mobs attack Paul Robeson at the
famous Peekskill, N.Y., concert in the late 1940s; we are not
told that Robeson was a lifelong acolyte of the
Stalin regime and that he opposed civil liberties for those on
the Left with whom he disagreed.

Some critics have praised the series for not having the
proverbial "talking heads" so familiar from other
documentaries. In my view, this is a weakness. Knowledgeable
commentators could have put events in
context, corrected some of the absurdities offered by
self-interested contemporaries, and separated truth from
falsehood. No amount of powerful film and remembrances by
observers can compensate for the absence of
informed commentary.

Ronald Radosh is a senior research associate at the Center for
Communitarian Policy Studies, George
Washington University.